He went to shower and emerged to find her eating melon on the terrace with her dusty shoes and socks off, her toes stuck through the railing of the terrace. How worn and raw they looked, so different from the delicate cut-glass ones he had seen in Jerusalem! It can’t be that she’s fallen in love with me, he thought, gazing westward at the sun struggling out of the afternoon haze, feeling groggy from his missed nap. All summer long the sun had seemed to rise several times a day, each sunrise hotter and more brutal. The red juice of the watermelon trickled down her chin. She wiped it with the back of her hand and went off to shower and wash her hair, which was wrapped in a red-striped towel when she returned.
It was 6 P.M., though the light still glared fiercely. Suddenly the house seemed full of her: there wasn’t a corner where she hadn’t left some part of her, some item she had touched or used. Through her thin house frock, her breasts looked small and weak. It would have been different if I’d found her myself, he thought, instead of having her served up to me. She was leafing through the newspaper, drops of water dripping from her hair, still eating slice after slice of watermelon. “That lunch made me terribly thirsty,” she apologized, glancing at the movie section. Had he decided what film he wanted to see? Molkho hesitated. If he knew his son, the boy hadn’t taken a key; perhaps they should wait for him, after which he would be glad to see Carmen. The music, he smiled, would be livelier than last night’s chamber concert, although if she wasn’t in the mood for opera, Gandhi was recommended too.
All at once he found himself telling her about his trip to Berlin. She listened tensely while he described the Voles Opera, which were the latest thing in Europe, where the opera houses were as full as the theaters were empty; the performance of Orpheus and Eurydice, in which the male lead had astoundingly been sung by a woman; and—but why was he doing this; and with a grin yet!—his conversation in the beer cellar with the legal adviser. What an absurd idea that woman had sprung on him—and yet, as if it made perfect sense, he hadn’t stopped thinking of it since! From time to time, Ya’ara turned her bowed head to stare at the sea, which glittered with the rays of the slowly setting sun. “How could she have said such a thing?” he demanded resentfully. “Maybe I could have done more to keep my wife alive. I wouldn’t have minded her telling me that. After all, she had a husband who died too. If I killed my wife, then you killed him, I told her. But that didn’t faze her one bit. Maybe I did, but not like you, she said to me.”
He sniffed glumly. There were sounds outside the apartment. Suddenly fearing that his son might arrive and find Ya’ara in a house frock with his wife’s towel like a turban on her head, he rose impulsively. “Come,” he said, “let’s catch the first show. We’ll leave the key with the neighbors and put a note on the door. I honestly can’t remember what time he said he’d be back—if he said anything, because lately he doesn’t say much to me.”
THE LAST STRANDS of light were still glimmering in the summer night when they returned after nine. From the stairs, he saw with a sinking feeling that his note was still there, and hurriedly unlocking the door, he found the apartment dark and empty. “But what’s the matter with him!” he cried out in despair, overcome by fresh worry. “Where is he? He said he’d be home tonight! He’s been gone since Saturday morning; how long can a hike last?” Going to the boy’s room, which looked like a foreign land in the yellow lamplight, he began rummaging among piles of papers on the desk, fumbling through drawers of old notebooks, even turning inside out the pockets of the dirty jeans on the bed, looking for some sign, some Scout circular, some name of a friend, that might be a clue to the boy’s whereabouts. “It’s ridiculous to have to be doing this,” he yelled irately, grabbing the phone book and searching for the number of his son’s classmate’s parents who had called the night before. “Did your boy turn up in the end?” he asked them over the phone. It took them a while to remember that he had ever been lost. “Now it’s my turn to be worried,” he said to them. “My son still isn’t back from his hike. I thought perhaps you might know the names of some of the boys in the class.”
He jotted down some names and numbers and dialed them one by one, yet no one could tell him anything. Wide-eyed, he looked at Ya’ara, who was sitting in front of the silent television, calmly watching him panic. “But I can’t have this!” he wailed, pacing frantically. “I want to know where he is and who he went with! Maybe I should go to his Scout den.” “Why don’t you,” said Ya’ara. “I’ll wait here.” “No, come with me,” he insisted. “He’ll have the shock of his life if he comes home to find a strange woman in the house. Let’s go.”
They drove the few blocks to the den, a green cabin that stood at the bottom of some stairs. “Don’t bother,” he said to her as she opened her car door, “I’ll be right back.” He all but ran down the dark steps, but the cabin was locked and lifeless. In an empty lot nearby, some children were standing around a small fire, and he went to have a word with them; though they too knew nothing about any hike, they were at least able to give him the name and address of one of the Scout leaders. “That’s the best I could do,” he told Ya’ara when he rejoined her in the car. “Maybe I’m being hysterical, but I feel I should go there.”
Again he told her to wait for him in the car. “I won’t be a minute,” he said, dashing into the building, where he quickly scanned the mailboxes, bounded up the stairs, and rang a doorbell. The Scout leader was not home.
Although she was waiting obediently in the car when he returned, she gave him a searching look. “I know I’m overdoing it,” he apologized, boyishly out of breath, “but I have to clear this up. It doesn’t make sense that no one knows anything. Maybe he went off somewhere on his own. Why don’t we drop by his school? Of course, it’s closed for vacation—but still...”
Indeed, the school was dark and abandoned. “Wait here,” he said once more to Ya’ara, who clearly hadn’t thought of doing anything else. “I’ll have a look around and see if there are any notices up. Here, let me turn on the radio for you.” He found her a station that played music, unsuccessfully tried the locked gate, and then worked his way along the fence until he came to a hole. It was small and nearly at ground level, but after a moment’s indecision, he knelt and wriggled through it into the schoolyard, ducking volleyball nets and dodging backboards until he came to the main building, where he passed a bare bulletin board in a hallway and tried in vain to force the door of the principal’s office. Ya’ara was smoking thoughtfully when he came running back. “I couldn’t find a thing,” he shouted through the fence. “The place is dead. But I think there’s a janitor on the premises, and if you’ll just wait a while, I’ll try to find him.” He ran back into the building and down a staircase, passing from wing to wing, through the high school, the junior high school, the elementary school, losing his way in the eerily silent corridors with their inexpungible smells of rotten bananas and old sneakers, and even entering an open classroom, through whose windows the thin moon that shone on the desks stacked with chairs made him feel all over again the stomach-knotted sorrow of youth. Damn him! he thought, weeping inwardly. And I’m to blame, I’m to blame too.
It was nearly ten by the time he returned to the car, pale and anguished. “Let’s listen to the ten o’clock news,” he said. “If anything happened, we’ll hear about it.” But there was nothing. “Maybe he’s home by now,” suggested Ya’ara softly. “Yes,” Molkho agreed, “and here we’ll have been going out of our minds with worry! There’s a pay phone up the street by the post office; we can call from there. Now you see what children are like! Sometimes they’re nothing but trouble.”